Well I've been thinking about getting one of these since the first iPad and I finally got one. A cheap one. The revolutionary in me wishes someone with an upgrade fetish had gifted me their old iPad. There's a thought. Start doing that, people.
To preserve my sanity whilst (while?) I acclimatise to this not-so-new technology (and its infuriating tendency to ignore my presses of the spacebar) I thought I would blog about my experiences as a touchscreen/tablet PC novitiate - my daily joys and frustrations, observations and epiphanies, as well as reviews and suggestions of apps that I come to use.
This is the first such blog.
Obviously.
That was obvious, right?
My first impression, after waiting for the thing to charge, was: 'Hey, this is awesome!' The screen is clear and bright, the interface is intuitive and easy to use - so far so good. The D101 comes loaded with a slew of accessories (that I'll get into later) and I have a quick play around with those before I get down to installing new apps. I bought this thing for the primary purpose of drawing and creativity, after all.
Straight off the bat it tells me there isn't enough memory to install anything, when there clearly is. Well that's annoying. Persevering I manage to install a few things but still intermittently encounter the 'insufficient storage' error. After swearing at my new tablet a little I feel much better.
Turning to Youtube for some musical therapy I find that the speakers aren't very good, but then I guess that's what headphones are for. So there's something I can get for my birthday. While I wasn't expecting deep bass tones pumping from my tablet I was expecting it to sound better than my mobile phone. Which it doesn't. In case that wasn't obvious. Dammit, it was obvious again, wasn't it? It also doesn't seem to be able to background play videos, which is peculiar, but I suppose there's a good reason for that. One which doesn't want me to enjoy Wilco's live show while checking my facebook, apparently.
The onscreen touch keyboard seems to be having problems keeping up with me, or I with it, and I find the necessity to switch to numeric and characters thoroughly annoying. But I guess that's what usb keyboards are for... On that note, I rather miss my PgDn, PgUp, Home, End, Alt and Tab keys, which I use for navigation more often than I'd realised. Oh, God how I miss you Alt-Tab! This probably wouldn't annoy someone who's never relied on keyboard shortcuts for efficiency, but for me it's a hassle.
Psychologically I'm rather enjoying the tactile nature of the thing. That is to say, touching the thing is using the thing and using it is touching it. Although in the time it's taken to type this I've got quite a crick in my neck. So that's something to look forward to. Also, I think it will be some time before using a 'reverse squeeze' motion to zoom will not make me feel like I'm in an episode of NCIS or CSI. Actually the swishing motions required to use the interface are far less troublesome than I thought they would be, and far less terrifying than when pdople have thrown me their iphone while driving and asked me to 'look it up'. Maybe now I'll be able to do that without breaking into a sweat. That said, the technology has a tendency to 'long-press select' things I'm not interested in when I'm actually just 'slide scrolling', but again I suppose that could be a user error.
Overall it seems my initial impessions were correct: this *is* cool - and not just because it feels like an episode of CSI.
Next: The serious business of games!
No comments:
Post a Comment